Have you ever seen a photo of yourself and thought, “That looks nothing like me,” but your friends and family love the picture and think it looks just how you always look to them?
This experience is actually quite common. Why does it occur? The answer is simple: Mirrors.
There’s a difference between your image in the mirror and in photos. The image you see in the mirror is reversed compared to the image that others see face-to-face with you. Your friends are familiar with your non-reversed image, while you are familiar with your reversed image in a regular mirror.
So, one reason we don’t particularly like photographs of ourselves is that those pictures present a view of our faces less familiar to us. This phenomenon is likely due to the mere exposure effect, which is the consistent finding that we’re more comfortable with and favorable toward things we see frequently.
Use the mere exposure effect to your advantage. Repeated exposure to a stimulus facilitates liking, so you can leverage the mere exposure effect to increase your liking for your own photographs. Research shows that exposures of shorter durations are more effective at increasing liking than longer duration exposures.
You can use a photograph as a background photo on your cell phone or rapidly scan through photographs of yourself, which may provide repeated short exposures and may increase your appreciation for those photographs.
Alternatively, get a True Mirror, a non-reversing mirror in a display box developed by John Walter. The True Mirror has led to many revelations in how people view themselves.
Perhaps both images are true in knowing yourself and should be accepted and appreciated.
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